OFF THE RAILS

Is Amtrak’s WiFi Still Blocking LGBT Sites As Porn?

A report out of Maryland claims that Amtrak’s wifi service blocks out LGBT news sites like the Seattle Gay News, GayCityNews.com, LesbianNews.com, and other similar sites, listing them as porn. Ugh, didn’t we go through this once already?

This past July, When Zack Rosen former editor of the D.C.-based blog The New Gay found his own site blocked as porn while on board an Amtrak train, he wrote a commentary entitled, “Fuck You, Amtrak, For Making Gays ‘Dirty'” in which he threatened to masturbate in the dining car or fuck a man in first class if they didn’t unblock his totally safe-for-work site.

Back then Mark Mastro, a gay team member directly responsible for the launch of AmtrakConnect Wi-Fi in-station and on-board, wrote Zack apologizing for the accidental censorship:

Unfortunately, something is occurring with the automatic content filtering system we are using and we are attempting to determine why it is randomly blocking sites such as this

OK, so an overzealous porn-blocking software was to blame the first time. But now a Maryland blog has just discovered that their WiFi is still blocking LGBT news sites with absolutely no porn content. We guess “gay” is still a dirty word.

You’d think that Amtrak would have spent some time picking out which LGBT sites pass the porn test the first time around rather than waiting for LGBT blogs to bitch about it every time Amtrak calls our daily news pornographic.

Image via Gamma Man

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